According to NASA, global temperatures have been rising since about 1880.

They also tell us that 20 of the warmest years on record have occurred since 1981 and that 10 of the warmest years on record occurred during the last 12 years, notwithstanding a solar minimum that occurred from 2007-09.

By using ice cores they have determined that carbon dioxide levels had not exceeded 300 parts per million for the last 650,000 years until 1950. Since then it has spiked to 380 parts. And there is no question that larger quantities of CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in atmosphere.

Now you can argue with NASA if you want to, but they have convinced me the world is warming. The fact that the spike in CO2 and this warming trend coincide with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution convince me that humans burning fossil fuels is a significant, if not the predominant, contributing factor to this warming.

I am less convinced that we can predict future world temperatures over the next century. Nonetheless, I think it is prudent to assume that we are likely to see warmer temperatures in the future.

But I am also convinced that any attempts to address this situation by the U.S. unilaterally trying to burn fewer fossil fuels are folly. The U.S. only contributes about 18 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. If we cut that in half, something that would be a near physical impossibility and catastrophically costly to the U.S. consumer, the effect would barely be measurable. China's CO2 emissions are already a third higher than the U.S., and those of other developing countries, like India, are sharply rising.

Those who believe that we can somehow persuade and cajole other countries to stop burning fossil fuels are delusional.

The developing countries are not going forego their emergence into the industrial age because of a fear that doing so may affect the climate. Their internal political stability depends on rapidly increasing their citizens' standard of living. Politically speaking, there is no mechanism to agree to, much less enforce CO2 emission restrictions. It is not going to happen.

All of this is not too suggest that we should not be looking at ways to reduce our reliance on burning fossil fuels. There are other bad side effects from burning fossil fuels that have more immediate harmful effects. It produces emissions that cause smog and fine particulate matter, both of which cause respiratory problems. We also make a lot of useful products out of fossil fuels and we will run out of the stuff one day. Letting it literally go up in smoke is not a good idea in the long term.

But whatever we do to reduce burning fossil fuels has to make economic sense. The American public is not going to pay dramatically higher energy costs in some quixotic attempt to reduce greenhouse gases.

One reasonable strategy would be to get serious about conservation. And to some degree we have. Per capita energy use in the U.S. has been falling in recent years. According to a recent study reported in Scientific American, our reduction in per capital energy use and a higher reliance on natural gas actually reduced U.S. carbon emissions by nearly 2 percent last year.

And that brings up natural gas. Burning natural gas produces only about half the carbon dioxide other fossil fuels do. While President Obama has paid lip service to developing and exploiting the vast natural gas reserves that have been unlocked by new technologies in the last decade, his administration has actually done more to impede the conversion to natural gas than encourage it. Why we do not have a national policy that encourages and incentivizes the rapid development of natural gas use, especially to replace diesel as a transportation fuel, is beyond comprehension.

But we also need to be thinking about dealing with the consequences of a warmer earth and begin developing strategies to mitigate problems that will cause. The most obvious is that much of the world's population lives along the coasts in relatively low lying areas. We need to be thinking about how to protect those areas from a rising sea level.

But instead of any of these, the Obama administration and many environmentalists have blinders on and can see no solution except trying to reduce carbon emissions by burning fewer fossil fuels. Primarily they seek to accomplish this by jiggering the market to make green energy, like wind and solar, more competitive. This strategy is enormously expensive and is subject to crony capitalism and other unintended consequences. But most important, it will not, at the end of the day, have any significant effect on climate change.